When NBCUniversal, Peacock and Blumhouse acquired the rights to The Exorcist from Morgan Creek, their first film, The Exorcist: Believer, was a direct continuation of William Friedkin’s original. Mike Flanagan’s version goes the other way. Judging by its first footage, it takes the demon out of the child’s bedroom and files it as a homicide case.

As Deadline’s Glenn Garner reported, Blumhouse has released the first trailer for The Exorcist: Martyrs, introducing Scarlett Johansson as Detective Julie Miller. Miller ends the killing spree of a satanic priest, Father Sunday (John Leguizamo), only to be dragged back years later, when a new serial killer writes her name in the blood of a murdered altar boy on the walls of a church crypt.

Back on the case 13 years after Father Sunday, Miller teams up with a former prison chaplain, Father William (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and a rookie detective, Gina Restrepo (Sasha Calle), and uncovers an ancient evil that has linked killers such as H.H. Holmes, the Night Stalker and the Zodiac across generations. The film has been billed as an all-new story, connected neither to Believer, which grossed $136.2 million worldwide, nor to the world of the earlier films, though it is still built on characters created by William Peter Blatty.

The detective angle has a precedent inside the series. Blatty himself wrote and directed The Exorcist III, in which Lieutenant Kinderman investigates demonic murders bearing the hallmarks of the executed Gemini Killer, a figure Blatty partly modeled on the Zodiac. Flanagan, who writes and directs Martyrs, appears to be reaching back to that strand rather than to the possession of Regan MacNeil.

It is also familiar ground for a filmmaker whose television work, from The Haunting of Hill House to Midnight Mass and The Fall of the House of Usher, keeps returning to faith, guilt and inherited evil, and who has already handled a horror sequel to a canonical film with Doctor Sleep. The supporting cast includes Diane Lane, Jacobi Jupe, Scoot McNairy, Gil Bellows and Laurence Fishburne. David Robinson and Jason Blum produce for Blumhouse-Atomic Monster and Morgan Creek, with Alexandra Magistro and Ryan Turek as executive producers.

The road to the screen has not been straight. Universal originally dated the film for March 13, 2026, pulled it from the calendar, and has since set it for March 12, 2027, a spring-break slot the studio had previously reserved for an event film.

Samantha Sloyan, a Flanagan regular who shot what she calls a small role, has already set the bar. From what little she saw through a monitor on set, she told Deadline, it is “the scariest thing that I’ve seen him do.” That is a claim to measure against Midnight Mass, and the trailer is the first public evidence for it.